No Time to Waste

Atticus is the anonymous poet and New York Times Bestselling author of Love Her Wild, The Dark Between Stars and The Truth About Magic. Dubbed “The World’s Most Tattoo-able Poet” by Galore Magazine, he has been featured in Time Magazine, Elle, The Guardian, Fast Company, Publisher’s Weekly, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, worked with Kygo, Maroon 5, Coach, Absolute Vodka, Stance Socks, Target, Urban Outfitters and Refinery 29, all while wearing a mask and keeping his identity...

Brian Kelly aka The Points Guy has become one of the top influencers and experts in the travel and hospitality space. Anyone in my close circle knows how passionate I am about travel, my first true love, and my borderline obsession w points. I think I’ve visited 21 countries now and wouldn’t be surprised if guy’s been to the remaining 175. Brian’s quickly become the go-to-guy when it comes to the Points Game - using lucrative credit card signup bonuses and strategic travel to accrue rewards...

Grandma Joy (of “Grandma Joy’s Road Trip” fame) is a spunky 91-year-old adventurer who’s been traveling the country with her grandson, Brad for the last chunk of years. Their goal has been to try and visit all 63 U.S. National Parks and they’ve only got one to go now! After you hear some of Grandma Joy’s pearls of wisdom, you’ll see why she’s become something of a celeb in her small Ohio town after being on the Rachel Ray show and recently being profiled in People Magazine. She’s living like...

Writer Gretchen Rubin is widely known as an expert on Happiness and Good Habits. Few know that she actually started her career in law, as Editor of the Yale Law Review and clerking for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court. One day Gretchen came to an important conclusion about her life: It was time to move off this path because she realized she would rather fail as a writer than succeed as a lawyer. Except she didn’t fail. Gretchen wrote five NYT Bestsellers including “The...

Kate Bowler is a religious historian and Professor at the Duke Divinity School. She’s also a witty, warm, wildly successful author, wife and mom living with Stage IV Cancer. Much of Kate’s early work was focused on the Prosperity Gospel - the belief that if you had the right faith, and prayed the right prayers, God would reward you with health, wealth and happiness. Soon after writing “Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel” Kate got diagnosed with Stage IV Colon Cancer at...

Sunita Puri is the Medical Director of Palliative Medicine at the Keck Hospital and Norris Cancer Center of the University of Southern California. She’s also the author of 2019 bestseller That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour. Not since Suleika Jaouad’s Between Two Kingdoms have I experienced such poignant and elegant writing that captures the essence of the author’s experience so expertly. Sunita documents the life events that led her to the palliative path, the...

Sister Aletheia was profiled by the NY Times in “Meet the Nun Who Wants You to Remember You Will Die” reviving the Memento Mori movement. Memento Mori is the practice of intentionally thinking about our own death as a means of appreciating the present and living a better life now. Sister Aletheia’s path to the convent was anything but conventional. She was a rebellious atheist who loved punk rock and spent her 20s volunteering, then working in Bay Area tech before finding her way back to...

BJ Miller is a Hospice & Palliative Care Doctor with a unique path that brought him to this work. As a sophomore at Princeton, while goofing around one night with his buddies, BJ climbed on top of a sleeping commuter train and was immediately electrocuted by 11,000 volts. As a result, BJ lost both his legs at the knee and one arm making him a triple amputee. BJ and I talked not about his accident or the fact that he now has two futuristic metal blades for legs, but about his deep care for...

Writer and Comedic Actress Annabelle Gurwitch has a story I first read about in the New York Times in November that caused my own jaw to drop. Last summer, Annabelle walked into an Urgent Care Clinic in a mini mall for a COVID test...and walked out with a Stage IV lung cancer diagnosis. She shared her story along with how she’s managing life her now with this chronic, terminal illness that thankfully hasn’t robbed her of her humor. NYT Op-Ed: The Coronavirus Saved My Life You’re Leaving...

Greg McKeown is a bestselling author and the host of the popular podcast What’s Essential where he talks to a wide range of guests about prioritizing what matters most in life. Yes, we hit on his new book Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most a follow up to his first NYT bestseller, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less but the bulk of our conversation was SO not the heady academic one I expected. Instead Greg was courageously vulnerable in sharing his own family...

Sheryl Sandberg’s professional career is nothing short of legendary. In the early days at Google, she scaled ad sales from 4 to 4,000 people. Then she was handpicked by Mark Zuckerberg to become the COO at Facebook - a title she still holds. In 2013, Sheryl published her first book Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead which sparked a global movement empowering women to take their seat at the table, and she is regarded as one of top business leaders in the world when it comes to power,...

Meet my personal palliative care nurse, Cecilia Benns. If you don’t know what that is job is, or you associate it with hospice care for people who are like days out from dying, you’re not alone, and we’re here to help. Hoping people walk away with some new knowledge - I myself had no idea about these kinds of resources for people in my situation - because the more I learn, the more comfortable and confident I feel when the fear creeps in about my eventual demise. Another reminder that...

Dr. Martin Inderbitzin is a world-renowned Swiss-German Neuroscientist and Mindset Specialist whose previous research focused on stress, emotions and understanding how the brain and the body processes it all. Then 9 years ago, he received a gut-wrenching pancreatic cancer diagnosis which forced him to take his life’s work and put it into practice for himself as a patient now grappling with his mortality. Not to mention deciding to train for a triathlon - with zero experience in the sport -...

Brad Ludden was a young professional whitewater kayaker whose life was first touched by cancer at 12 years old when his aunt was diagnosed with breast cancer. By 18, he was sharing his passion for kayaking with pediatric oncology patients and soon after, founded First Descents to help young adults in the cancer community experience the adventure and community of the outdoors free of charge. 20 years later, the organization is still thriving, offering more than 70 programs across the county...

I’m sure you know Matthew McConaughey. He’s an Academy Award-Winning actor, a proud Texan, a Philanthropist, a new owner of Austin’s MLS team and most recently, a NYT bestselling author for his memoir, Greenlights. What Matthew and I talked about in our conversation hit deep. We talked about my current cancer situation and how I’m doing what I can to make the most of it. We debated over how much fight to bring to life vs how much flow and how to know what’s needed when. And we agreed that...

Oceana Sawyer is a former corporate trainer at companies like HP and Levi Strauss now turned death doula. Just like birth doulas who help bring babies into this world at the beginning of life, a death doula helps actualize the emotional and spiritual wishes of the dying at the end of life. For anyone who’s ever wanted to know what dying’s like, in this conversation Oceana details every single step of her father’s passing and the experience was far more beautiful than I ever would have...

There’s so much behind the 10,000 kilowatt smile of media mogul Katie Couric. More than just sunshine, Katie’s known tragedy and loss in her personal life and gained wisdom in hindsight from those experiences. After her first husband passed away from colorectal cancer, Katie founded Stand Up to Cancer which has since raised over $600M for cancer research. We talked about the need for us to bring honest conversation about mortality into the light, and the comfort it could bring to people if...

We’re going to take a little hiatus from the weekly podcast production machine which has been churning and burning for 6 months now. I don’t imagine it will be too long because #notimetowaste but follow @notimetowasteproject on IG for updates. I shared a personal update and then announced an exciting new partnership with AKTIV Against Cancer led by previous pod guest Ethan Zohn! After we return from the break, at the end of select No Time to Waste episodes, Ethan will share stories of...

I only recently got introduced to Maggie Smith - the poet, not the actress - when I stumbled upon her book Keep Moving that I really loved. Whereas most books about navigating grief and loss have a somber, self-reflective tone, hers included short motivational quotes with more of a Ted Lasso vibe. Maggie was not the tortured creative soul I expected from a poet. Thanks to her big energy, high wattage smile and sense of humor, we had a blast in our convo and now I’m thinking about getting...

I genuinely believe my dad embodies much of what No Time to Waste is all about. I’ve witnessed first-hand his zest for life, his sense of adventure, his desire to help people and his evolution as a self-aware human. And I’ve realized only in recent years how proud I am to be my father’s daughter. We talk about his non-linear career path from flower delivery truck driver to park ranger to attorney to therapist, how for a few short years we became a horse family (but not in the traditional...